Chapter Eleven In Which Zada Struggles Not to Come to a Conclusion
It was late at night by the time they returned from their outing to see the sisters, pausing only to grab snacks from an enormous pantry stuffed with junk food on their way up to Daphne’s room.
Zada accepted an armload of lavender jelly-swells and a new savory cotton candy called Cheese Breeze, and tried to tamp down her excitement at the prospect of finally seeing where Daphne spent so much of her time.
When they walked through the doorway, Zada had to work to keep her face neutral.
It was so generic. Daphne had the room of any rich girl in any middling teen drama.
Pale pink walls, a huge four-poster bed and matching dresser, a tastefully done artificial window that opened onto a serene hillside scene—even the curtains boasted nothing more interesting than a single looped animation of pansies swaying in the breeze.
Where were the extinct bugs and the grotto rock posters? Where was the irreverence, the sense of possibility? Where was any trace of the girl who lit up a room like a firecracker?
“What?” said Daphne, retrieving two bottles of rose cola from a minifridge hidden in the wall. “You’re making a face.”
“I am not,” said Zada. She set the snacks on the dresser, schooling her features to be even more neutral. Absurdly neutral. Outrageously neutral.
Daphne sighed. “You’re making the careful absence of a face, then.”
“The room,” Zada said haltingly. “It’s not very you.”
“Ah, well.” Daphne glanced around, seemingly unconcerned. “It was like this when I was a baby, and Grandfather isn’t the biggest fan of change.” She coughed. “How do you want to begin?”
“Okay,” said Zada. “So, we have a list of ninety thousand matches. We have data from the sisters on about three hundred people. Everyone with an A last name. We start from the beginning of the nuns’ accounts, we take in each one, and we decide how happy they seem with their match on a scale of, let’s say, one to five.
Then we log each one by happiness score and by year, so we get a sense of whether the problem is actually increasing or not. ”
Daphne threw herself face down onto the bed. “This is going to take the rest of our natural lives,” she grumbled to her pillow. She flopped around to peek up at Zada, who handed her a fluffy blob of Cheese Breeze.
“Fuel up, then.”
“How do you intend to chart this out?” Daphne added, pausing to cram the Cheese Breeze into her mouth. “Until the moment we’re successful, if they find out what we’re doing they’ll shut it down in a hurry, and every graph-making program you can find can be accessed by the security council.”
“Not every program,” said Zada, feeling only a little smug. “Not the one I made.”
Daphne sat up straight. “Do tell.”
“I was testing my skills,” Zada told her. “Our last year at Dalrymple. I wanted to chart how the night sky would’ve looked, before the dome went up.”
“Choked with pollution, right?” said Daphne.
“Then a long time before the dome,” Zada amended. “I borrowed one of the school Gems, had to get special permission and everything. Can I show you?”
“Sure thing,” Daphne said. “Catch.” She slid the ring off her finger, cloned Gem and all, and tossed it at Zada, who instinctively ducked, and then winced. “Don’t worry, they’re indestructible.”
Zada took the ring, discreetly checking the SmartGem for damage and thankfully finding none. She slipped the ring on, feeling a brief spike of something at the feel of the skin-warmed metal against her finger.
“Gem,” said Zada. “Show program Straight on till Morn.” A pleasant beep, and then the environmental controls dimmed the lights and they were standing in a huge three-dimensional grid, projected on the walls and floor.
“So you enter the position of each star, on three axes, right, because space is 3D, and then each point also gets a size rating.”
“Huh,” Daphne said, blowing out a mouthful of air. “How did you find the time to do this, on top of exams and assignments and triple cello practice and sleep?”
“I didn’t,” said Zada. “Nobody was grading me on sleep.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Daphne. “Take a jelly-swell before I cry. And we’re really gonna log all our info here?”
Well. The Founders Creed had said to be content, unselfish, faithful, honest, reasonable, patient, and grateful. They didn’t technically say anything about not showing off.
“Gem, import data set,” said Zada. She bit open a jelly-swell and shuffled through projections of Daphne’s various screens until she found the list of ninety thousand matches.
“What are you doing?” It was probably Zada’s imagination that Daphne sounded genuinely interested, but she’d take it.
“Each match can be rendered as a dot on the board,” said Zada.
“X axis, one spouse. Y axis, the other. The point where the axes meet is their match. Z axis, all of the matches by year. The star will be larger or smaller depending on how happy the couple overall seems to be with each other. Now, the three axes will only take number inputs, so we’ll need some way to reduce each person to a number—”
“Birthdays?” said Daphne thoughtfully.
“Sure,” said Zada, and then on sudden inspiration. “Or school ID number. It’s in every match announcement and that way, there won’t be duplicates.”
Daphne stretched off the bed to jam a Cheese Breeze in her mouth. “Okay then. Go nuts.”
“Okay,” said Zada. She input their changes. “Gem, graph new version.”
The program hummed for a moment, and then they were surrounded by ninety thousand points of light.
Daphne laughed. “Okay,” she said, looking down at the dots illuminating her hands. “That’s pretty cool.”
“I put star size as average for everyone,” Zada explained. “Since we don’t know yet what the value is.”
“Hang on, hang on, stand over here,” said Daphne. She crouched down. “From this angle, does it look like I’m skiing?”
From the vantage point Daphne had indicated, most of the dots near Daphne formed something like a very jagged diagonal line upward.
“Wait.” Zada shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Daphne dropped her imaginary ski poles, or whatever they were called. Nobody skiied because New Ionia was pretty flat for a city built on a mountaintop and—Zada’s mind was skittering in every direction at once.
“It shouldn’t be anything like a line,” Zada explained. “It should be like a scattered cloud.” She gestured at the sloping array of dots. “These results only happen if a major predictor of who marries who is their student number, and that can’t be it. I must’ve screwed up somewhere.”
Daphne had gone very still. “Unless you didn’t,” she said.
“What?” said Zada, because Daphne was almost never still.
“Okay,” said Daphne. She pushed herself off the bed and began to pace the room. “You didn’t hear this from me. Your student number is the order you were admitted to a finishing school.”
“It is?” said Zada.
“Yeah.” In the dim room, Daphne’s eyes were very wide.
“Zada, the order you’re let into finishing school is determined by—I don’t know, it’s some complicated algorithm, but it’s a little bit your grades and your behavior score, and a whole shit ton who your family is, how rich they are, their reputation—I mean, it’s basically ‘how good of a match will you be?’ How beneficial will your marriage be to the other family? ”
“That can’t be it.” Zada shook her head. “If that was true—”
“Yeah,” said Daphne. “You see what this means, right?”
“No,” said Zada. “Because if that’s it—” She swallowed hard.
“If what you’re saying is true—” And this much, at least, was true: Daphne never lied to her.
That was one fixed point in a shifting star storm in her mind.
“It must be something else,” she said quickly.
“The student numbers aren’t a reflection of how marriageable we are, it’s just a rumor. ”
“I overheard it straight from Grandfather,” said Daphne.
“Do you think maybe this is what soulmates are?” said Zada. “The person perfect for you is the one who can see and understand your social status—”
Daphne shook her head. “Isn’t it supposed to be true love? Look me in the eye and tell me you believe that the only thing that could possibly set your heart on fire is meeting your close-to-exact social equal.”
There had to be some other explanation. Zada bit the inside of her cheek. “I screwed up the program,” she said at last. “I coded it wrong.”
“Please,” said Daphne with a snort. “You’re amazing at that kind of thing and you know it.” She took a step back, regarding the distribution of the points. “You know, it starts off pretty cloudlike,” she said. “It only really concentrates into diagonals about here—”
“Which would indicate the problem began about twenty years ago,” said Zada numbly.
“Hold up,” said Daphne. “How did you and Buford match, then? He’s completely—”
“Out of my league, I know.”
“I was going to say mind-numbingly boring, but his family is well-off,’” Daphne said.
Zada hummed, pulling up her code to double-check. As long as she could find an issue within it, everything could still be all right. She’d have to marry Buford, but the world as she knew it could continue turning. “If I thought your theory wasn’t nonsense—”
“Yeah?” Daphne raised her eyebrows. “If?”
“Buford’s family is attempting to outrun a scandal.” She scanned her inputs line by line. Everything was built on what came before. Any malfunction and the system shouldn’t have been able to graph points at all.
“Really? I thought he was upright as a flagpole,” said Daphne.
“He is,” said Zada absently. “But he has an older brother—”
“Christopher Arnoth,” said Daphne, nodding. “We attended a number of the same very boring social functions. Made no less boring by the Arnoth sons, I assure you.”
“Well, Christopher gambles.” Heart sinking, Zada still could not find an error.
Daphne tilted her head to one side. “How do you know?”
“Because my mother is on the guard,” Zada told her, “and gate guards gossip with all the other guards. That’s not—”